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But it hardly ends before you cry out: What a hard thing that those seven boys should suffer for the crimes of a father and grandfather! Yes. But it is always so. Let everyone who does wrong know that he was not only, as in this case, against two generations, children and grandchildren, but against all the generations of coming time. That is what makes dissipation and uncleanness so awful. It reverberates in other times. It may skip one generation, as is suggested in the Ten Commandments: which say: "Visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation." Mind you, it says nothing about the second generation, but mentions the third and the fourth. That accounts for what you sometimes see, very good parents with very bad children. Go far enough back in the ancestral line and you find the source of all the turpitude. "Visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon the children, unto the third and fourth generation." If, when Saul died, the consequences of his iniquity could have died with him, it would not have been so sad. Alas, no! Look on that hill a few miles out from Jerusalem and see the ghastly burdens of those seven gibbets, and the wan and wasted Rizpah watching them. Go to-day through the wards and alms-houses, and the reformatory institutions where unfortunate children are kept, and you will find that nine out of ten had drunken or vicious parents. Yea, day by day, in the streets of our cities you find men and women wrecked of evil parentage. They are moral corpses. Like the seven sons of Saul — though dead — unburied. Alas! for Rizpah, who, not for six months, but for years and years has watched them. She cannot keep the vultures and the jackals off.

(T. De Witt Talmage.)

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KJV: And Rizpah the daughter of Aiah took sackcloth, and spread it for her upon the rock, from the beginning of harvest until water dropped upon them out of heaven, and suffered neither the birds of the air to rest on them by day, nor the beasts of the field by night.

WEB: Rizpah the daughter of Aiah took sackcloth, and spread it for her on the rock, from the beginning of harvest until water was poured on them from the sky. She allowed neither the birds of the sky to rest on them by day, nor the animals of the field by night.